American Gospel - An Interview With Brandon Kimber

Hello, welcome to another episode of the William Brandham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research at William-Brandom.org and with me I have my very special guest, Brandon Kimber, director of the American Gospel Series. Brandon is good to have you on and to finally talk to you offline, not about the American Gospel Series. We did some work in the past but I've had several people who have told me through emails and comments in the videos they say you need to get Brandon Kimber on and let him tell his

story. So here we are. Well yeah thanks for having me. Good to be with you on on your show. Awesome. So for anybody who does not know you and I'm sure that there's very few but anybody who doesn't know you maybe you could just introduce yourself tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah. I'm Brandon Kimber born and raised in the Cleveland, Ohio area. I'm married to my wife Stacey. We have four children, ages 12, youngest is six and all in between. Everyone's about to have birthdays so at this point we are 6, 8, 10 and 12 but that's about to

change to some odd numbers and make it harder for me to remember. So yeah I guess yeah I was born in this area and got into filmmaking at a young age. Just making videos. My dad bought a video camera when I was in eighth grade and from there I kind of just took the opportunity to do a video for anything I had a chance to make a video for whether it was a school project or I worked maintenance at a pool for a number of years and we started creating these documentaries about staff life at the end of every year for our staff awards dinner and it

was kind of through that where I taught myself how to edit and do like visual effects type of work. There's just mostly hands-on but I did end up going to college for film production.

On the religious side, I was born into a Christian family, both of my parents became Christians before I was born, kind of out of really godless lifestyles. My mother would tell us like she did all the drugs and just lived the party lifestyle.

Her mother died of cancer when she was pretty young and it just spiraled her into this really bad lifestyle and she found Jesus and her life changed. My dad was an atheist and had some difficult childhood with parents divorcing, his sister dying of cancer at 23 is mother dying a few years later also of cancer and he kind of went on this journey of investigating and Eastern religions doing meditation and searching for his inner divinity, things like that and then he was invited to Christian couples home for dinner.

They shared the gospel with him and he became a Christian after that point so I grew up hearing these stories about their lives before Christ and it was kind of the center of our household just always hearing about Jesus and going to church.

We raised in a assemblies of God Charismatic Church and in the mid 90s the Toronto blessing revival happened and this is a revival that has really impacted Bill Johnson of Bethel Church among other people who claimed to be apostles in the New Apostolic Reformation Movement.

So this revival happened and some people in our area went to it, came back and started having meetings where they were doing similar things, there was this kind of this idea that you could catch the fire or this anointing of the Holy Spirit and like transfer it to other people through the laying out of hands.

And I remember as a kid my parents took us to this meeting and we walked into this big it was kind of like a dining hall that you could have a wedding in but they're having these church services there and there's this...

people lined up, being prayed for, people being slain in the spirit,

running around, screaming and laughing, like the Holy laughter. All these really bizarre manifestations of, or supposed manifestations of the Holy Spirit that I had never experienced before. And my parents said, you know, they had been prayed for previously and really felt like they experienced a change in their life. And to this day, my mom says that something really changed in their marriage, and she thinks that this experience kind of saved their marriage in a way, which I can't really argue with. But they wanted us to get prayed for at this meeting, and you know, you're seeing all this stuff. And in my mind, as a kid, probably around age 10,

and what goes through your mind is if I don't fall over like everyone else, or do what everyone else is doing, you know, this pure pressure type of thing, they're going to think there's something wrong with me. Is Brandon not saved? Is, you know, something like that. So I ended up falling over, and I think going along with it. But our church kind of split over that movement, and the past of our church was not in favor of it. And my parents ended up disagreeing and leaving with another group and joining this new church that was pro-terrano blessing, where all of this

stuff was just happening all the time. So it was just a normal thing, you know, chairs in this sanctuary were all lined around the edges so that people could dance and wave flags and do all the crazy stuff you can think of. After a time, my father took us out of that church because he recognized that it was not healthy as far as teaching, as far as like the emphasis was too focused on these manifestations and experiences and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, not enough on the gospel. And looking back, I have more thoughts about that, but we were, we moved to a Nazarene

church for a decade or more after that. And it wasn't until I was in college that I started finding sermons on the internet where the gospel was much more clear.

Previously, you know, I say, I understood the gospel in the sense that Jesus died for my sins and that in some sense he was saving me from hell so that I could go to heaven.

But it was to focus on a fear of hell and being saved from Satan, whereas now like I would still affirm that hell is a biblical doctrine. I think Jesus talks about it more than anyone else in the Bible, but our salvation I view now more as being saved from God's justice by his grace rather than being saved from Satan necessarily.

There is a sense where that's true, but I think what I was lacking was kind of like a godly sorrow over my sin. I think my parents took us to this play called Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames where they basically it's like a church play where they have these skits of people in their everyday life.

They end up dying and they're either go to hell or heaven depending on their relationship with Jesus. And at the time it was terrifying for me because seeing these images of people dressed up like Satan or demons dragging people into this, it was like a tent with this fake fire coming out of it.

It was terrifying and so they kind of encouraged this very, I would say it's an unbiblical sinner's prayer idea where if you just pray this prayer, let's say the magic words you could go to heaven, I do believe that if someone has a recognition of their sin and a godly sorrow over their sin, they can say a prayer and express that.

Like god have mercy on me, a sinner, that's biblical, but it was more presented as these magic words that you kind of have to just keep praying every time. I would think that I would lose my salvation every time I sinned.

It was just a very fear-based having no assurance type of thing. So in college I get this much clearer understanding of the gospel and I also stumbled across Justin Peters' ministry and he has this seminar called Clouds Without Water which explains the word of faith movement and I then recognized that what I had grown up in was very influenced by the word of faith movement.

My parents went to Benny Hinn Crusades, had listened to Kenneth Hagen and Kenneth Copeland, things like that and it was very eye-opening. Over time, the more I was exposed to the biblical gospel and seeing these errors, I started just having this idea that I wanted to create a project to kind of help my friends and family understand what we had been raised in and why this was not biblical.

After I got out of college, I started working at the company I still work for as an intern. My boss and I started having these conversations. We both had this hyper-charismatic experience in our backgrounds and we're talking through these issues and after doing a number of crime television programs and crime documentaries, he basically gave me the green light to do a passion project and that's where the whole American gospel project started.

So it's interesting because you and I have similar journeys but in vastly different environments and with me it was I actually helped produce little videos and documentaries as well but I worked on the audio side with my friends and I had built this developed this thing that my friends called the Collins wire which basically connected anything audio to anything audio and I had built my own recording studio and was producing music and all kinds of weird things but I was in the message which was not it was like one step away from what you were in in the apostolic environment but

we called it going through the motions we would all go through those motions and there came a point in my life when I realized that you know if you try to force yourself into a forced emotion how is that coming from God and I thought through that you know often interestingly my family was a very unemotional family and whenever we would go to a church that had the wild craziness they would strongly condemn and say that's just a bunch of show that's not that's not what it's about so I had that in the back of my mind right I never realized that the whole thing was an

emotional show and though they did not accept other people's versions of the emotional show they had their own type of emotional show and yeah what you're saying reminds me of my parents my dad was kind of more like me very quiet more reserved and my mom is complete opposite outgoing and I feel like their personalities had a lot to do with how they responded to different things that happened in church like my mom was all in my dad was much more reserved but a lot of times people would like question why my dad's not reacting as emotionally

and kind of in some ways blame it on his past like with his parents dying as if he had this hurt in that wasn't healed or you needed inner healing or something like that.

I just don't think that's fair looking back. I just think a lot of this is connected to personality and how susceptible you are to like the peer pressure and psychological stuff going on around you.

Not that like you can't have emotion, a true emotion in your experience worshiping God. I mean, I totally believe that's biblical. But music alone creates emotion, whether it is a Christian song or a secular song.

And I've heard tons of people describe how, you know, they realized like I'm feeling the same feeling I feel in a worship service at church as I do in the secular concert. And it's because it's the music.

You cannot necessarily say that this is the presence of God. And I came to understand that pretty quickly. And I would notice, see, we went to different churches. I don't know that you and I have had this conversation, but I have mentioned on the podcast, but I went from random cult churches, from Arizona to South Carolina and everywhere in between, went to something like a lost count as probably 13 different schools that I went to growing up.

So it's the all these different flavors of different environments that was in the same kind of Pentecostal apostolic, we call it the message cult, but there would be different types of emotions. And people, the ministers, I would watch them pray upon the emotions of other people.

And I'm very, I have a very logical mind. If you're a Star Trek fan, I'm the spock of this world, right? I want to analyze everything and understand it. And so I would, like in my mind, whenever they would be preaching, I would calculate, okay, he's going to preach this opening is going to be a very welcoming, heartwarming, fancy story that everybody can relate to, then he's going to get to a small subject matter, then he's going to start screaming.

And then at the end, he's going to put the fear of God in you. And are you going to make it? Are you going to, and he was just building up people's emotions so that he could tear them down.

And I started noticing that, you go to different churches, it would be like that. But fast forward to today's world, when I realized that this Brannum cult had exploded and maybe not directly created all of the NAR, but strongly influenced it is probably a better way to say it.

I noticed the same patterns happening today, but it's like it's all the same patterns, but they're on steroids. Yeah. I would say that I can recall the influence of different people that, you know, are called God's Generals in the movement that we grew up in.

And probably because of that book, I'm not sure when that book came out what year, but I remember some family of mine pointing out like the life of John G. Lake, for example, and pointing to what they had read about his life and responding to that, which, you know, I believe that John G. Lake was a charlatan and his life story was mostly a work of fiction at this point, but this person responded to that with kind of a despair, like, why can't I achieve this level of power or like anointing with the baptism of the Holy Spirit as John

G. Lake, as if this unattainable standard based on fiction was creating this despair in their life, and I just realized how important it is to investigate these people and understand like what actual, what is the actual history.

And so a lot of what I'm doing in this current American Gospel project is trying to dive into that with some of your help. So far, you know, John G. Lake is a huge influence on Bill Johnson of Bethel Church.

And you can, you know, the students at their school of supernatural ministry are required to read his sermons, which are in a book compiled by Kenneth Copeland. And so a lot of, you know, this little God's language, the idea that man is on par with Jesus or equal to God.

You hear that in Kenneth Copeland and Bill Johnson, but they're getting it from people like John G. Lake. That's the language you read in those sermons. So it's just, yeah, I mean, if anyone has watched at least the four episodes that we've just released, there's lots of John G. Lake references.

But in the future, I, I hope to dive in deeper into his backstory as well as William Brannum and other, other generals as well. Right. I went backwards in my research from Brannum to Bosworth to Lake.

I was, it kind of spun out of control whenever I was trying to determine how the connection happened between John Alexander Dowey and William Brannum. Bosworth is the key obviously, but I didn't realize the significance of it when I first stumbled upon it.

I had traced from Brannum and Brannum held these, you know, revivals everywhere with Bosworth. And Bosworth was out of Dowey's sect. I had connected all of that. The piece that I had missed until maybe five, five or six years ago, that Bosworth had created a sub-cult, he joined a sub-cult in Dowey's Zion City that was led by Parham, Charles Fox Parham, and John G. Lake was in that community.

And they were trying to birth what eventually came to be the deliverance movement of today, they believed that they could exercise demons from people by physically assaulting them. And there were people who died in Zion City, you're familiar with all this research.

I'm sure, but the piece that I had missed is that there came a point in which the heads of Zion that weren't in the sect wanted to eradicate the whole thing. And they realized that people were being murdered in Zion City.

So they started working with the authorities. And it's about the same time that Parham gets exposed for his sexual misconduct with a young man. Well, it appears based off of everything that I can see in the researches, they all kind of fled because they were scared that they were going to get convicted on manslaughter charges.

And it looks very much like John G. Lake went to South Africa to just hide out. Bosworth hid on the road and the revivals and all of that interestingly turned into modern Pentecostalism in one way or another.

And there's one photograph you've probably seen at where it's got William Seymour, John G. Lake, F.F. Bosworth, Tom Hezmahal. That is William Joseph Seymour with that sect, that particular sect of Pentecostalism. So not many people understand the significance of that.

Wow, yeah, that's interesting. The whole connection between Dauy and what's going on with Bethel and Redding, California, I think, has been pretty interesting. I included some of your content in some of these episodes that I'm working on.

On the topic of grave soaking to kind of introduce what he did with Zion City and how he tried to convert New York and things like that. It's just crazy. This idea of bringing heaven to earth.

So, like. My first redding, it's called Bethel Redding part one. We try to show how Bethel has grown in the city of Redding over the years and they've gained influence on the city council to the point where they kind of forced one of their council members into the position of mayor and she's now the mayor of Redding. So you have Bethel is like in control and using that power and influence to, you know, buy favor in the community to get their new 96, it's probably like $99 million building project approved at this point.

But thankfully, from what I hear, and I think a lot of this started with COVID, but their influence has begun to die as far as like the number of students that they have now.

They were having, I think, between two to three thousand students a semester and I'm hearing now that it's around 500 at this point. So I don't know. Again, I think maybe the COVID stuff probably impacted that, but also just the more that people like us are exposing this stuff, I think more people are becoming aware that there are problems and more people are speaking out who have been in the movement.

And, you know, I think that's the best evidence because I always get accused of you know, not having any experience in what I'm critiquing, which isn't true. But I always try to interview people who were in it.

And so the critique doesn't make any sense because, you know, I've interviewed people that were former Bethel students and they're speaking from their own experience. And so yeah, that's just a big part of what I do. I do have a, I would say probably similar to you, I kind of have a fascination with history.

But it's more on the family history side, you know, as I mentioned, my father's mother and sister died young. So he never really liked to talk about it too much because it was emotionally difficult for him.

But he's always had like photos and artwork from them and letters. Like I found hundreds of letters written from my grandmother and my aunt and that just kind of... created an interest in history in general and just kind of documenting things so I think that plays a big part of why I like the documentary filmmaking stuff and just in this sense I'm trying to maybe capture what's going on in these discernment ministries that include people like you and me that have come out of these different movements and we're connecting with people that also have the same experiences and trying to share those stories in a way

that is compelling and helps explain truth and error in contrast so people can wake up because the stuff is really dangerous and I just think as far as Christianity it creates huge massive burdens on on people like we're telling people they're telling people in this movement that they have to basically duplicate Jesus and do greater miracles and quality than Jesus and that's not a biblical mandate at all you know there is that that phrase about doing greater works Jesus says that we'll do greater works but the greater works I believe is about the gospel going forth in a greater scope to all nations not doing greater miracles than Jesus like

the greatest miracle Jesus did was to raise himself from the dead how are we going to top that

yeah the funny part for me is that say I grew up on a doomsday call we believe that any minute the doomsday was going to happen in America would be obliterated and so for the first 37 years of my life I had 0.0% interest in history none whatsoever in fact I barely scraped through I did get good grades in school but I barely scraped through because right before the test would happen I would cram for it and did not retain none of it I retained none of it and then after I realized wait a minute this is all fake none of this is real I became fascinated with history

because I wanted to learn how we got to where we are now and I started to learn the power of history because if you can understand the mistakes that led to something that has happened like we see today with the NAR you can learn not to repeat those mistakes and it was in doing that exercise of trying to learn this I realized the reason why many of these ministries cover up their histories because if you cover up all of the mistakes that got them where they are then nobody can figure out that it's a big mistake. And so I started going down the spider web of path, John G. Lake being one

of them, go through all of their histories and say, okay, how much is being covered up? And sadly, I started realizing that many of the people that I thought were, I didn't use the term God's generals, but heroes of the faith, I guess I would have called them.

I realized that a vast majority of them have covered up histories that, you know, some of them may have had good intentions, some of them didn't, but a large part of their histories have been covered up to make them into worship of heroes. And that became for me highly problematic.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new Apostolic Reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen McCummery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

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The idolatry of these generals, heroes is a huge problem and I think it goes down to their idea of anointing. I think the biblical view of anointing is that every believer is anointed when they become a believer and that there's no people aren't, you can't like gain extra anointing and become like this elite level Christian that is above the rest. But I think that is one of the core problems with this movement is this misunderstanding of anointing and just this desire to get more and more by, you know, it could be by going to different

graves and trying to soak it, suck it out of people's graves or through artifacts. Like Bill Johnson has this revival museum collection. Scott John G. Lake's Bible Smith Wigglesworth Piano where they think that that anointing can be taken out of it. It's similar to like the Catholic Church's view of relics. I mean, they got, you know, body parts under altars. Very creepy.

And it's based on this twisting of scripture they'll use like the passage in I think it's first or second kings with the dead man being thrown on the bones of Alisha and coming back to life.

Or I think it's like Paul's handkerchief. In those examples God was specifically using the means of this object to perform a miracle to authenticate either a prophet or an apostle that they were actually his messengers speaking for him.

You can't take that to mean to like to conclude that now that there's actually anointing lingering in all dead bones and objects connected to different saints in the past. And in this case there are very questionable people who we would say aren't saints at all and there's definitely no anointing in them if that was a possibility.

But it's just very disturbing and it's just I guess I would say trying to find power through means other than the gospel or through God directly himself. If you want healing pray to God go to him don't go try to suck up an anointing from a grave and for or from other people like Bill Johnson always talks about going like how he went to oral Roberts and it's just it's really gross.

The whole it's it's the culture of honor like you said it's in some ways they acknowledge there's some bad things that these people these people did. But their their view is like you know to the meat spit out the bones focus on the good ignore the the sin and yes everyone sins and you know people in the Bible like King David sin greatly.

But what we're talking about with someone like John G Lake and Dowie these these are false teachers when we're talking about people who have this pattern of unrepentance and and lying and fraudulent activity just that marks their whole life it wasn't as if they like.

you know, stumbled and repented and then this is completely different. So I think that that is an important distinction to make that I see over and over again, you know, with someone like Todd Bentley, for example, this is a man who was involved in the Lakeland revival around 2008 and he was caught in an adulterous affair and before that was known everyone was saying that this is the new breed. He is in this example of someone who is going to like do greater miracles than Jesus. He has this anointing. And once the sin was made known, it was obvious that I mean, it was obvious to people who were in discernment

who were calling him out before that was known that he was a false teacher just based on the false prophecy and the bizarre manifestations like claiming that he's healing people by kicking them in the face with their biker boot and just the constant talk about all these angels are visiting me and giving me this extra biblical revelation. These are all red flags that should show you this is a false teacher. It shouldn't take the exposure of an affair to say, oh, he's a fraud the whole time. But like men like Bill Johnson, they after this was

exposed, they tried to restore him into ministry because they felt like he had because he was doing these miracles, apparently, he had this anointing and that God was still gifting him in these ways, despite the complete failures of morality. They're blinded by the miracles and the anointing aspect of it. And they're not even realizing that even in the Bible, there is such a thing as you know, false signs and wonders that can be done through Satan or you know, power other than God.

It could be it could be a trick like fake leg lengthening. It's just the it's a huge concern that I have and what I've tried to help people understand that just because someone has this alleged supernatural gift does not automatically mean that it's off God at all. They have built the equivalent of an architecture of brick lane using all of these events based off of supernatural phenomenon that they claim to be supernatural that is intended to circumvent the move of the Holy Spirit.

In other words, instead of the person going directly to the Holy Spirit, like you said, for their healing or praying to God for their healing, you've got to go through this man, you've got to go through this channel.

I live not five minutes from Branham's grave. So when I'm driving past it, I get to see all the people who are bowing down and praying to it, or I've not yet got to see anybody who's soaking it, but I have seen the videos online.

And what's interesting, I've mentioned this before, but right across the river is Colonel Sanders' grave, and you don't find people going and trying to soak to make better chicken. If so, I would go do it.

But it's just nonsensical, and I'm not a fan of horror movies. Growing up in this mess that we did, I'm really uncomfortable with them. But I have seen a couple, and there's a few that I've watched that had, I think they call it hudu, but down in this deep south, it's like voodoo, but it's a different flavor of it.

The whole movement really reminds you of this, because they're trying to channel spirits. And when I was in the message called this channeling of spirits, we thought was biblical and righteous, and Branham was talking to dead people who had crossed over to the other side.

And I thought nothing of it, and I'm kind of slapping myself in the face over it, because I read the Bible while I was believing all this nonsense. And it wasn't until after I left that I realized, wait a minute, if you read the Old Testament, it's the bad guys that are doing that, it's not the good guys.

And you know, Bethel, for example, they call what is essentially necromancy, they call it the cloud of witnesses, and they're claiming that no these people aren't actually dead because they're alive in heaven. It's the same thing that I think John G. Lake taught, that it's okay to talk with the dead as long as they're in heaven, not if you're calling them up from hell basically, right?

It's just, you don't talk to anyone who's dead because you can be deceived. You're not, you know, the dead aren't communicating with us. Yeah, very disturbing. So you and I connected, we were doing part three of the American gospel, the Spirit and Fire.

And you were interested in the brand of history that I had, so we collaborated a bit. And I'll be honest with you, when you contacted me, I had no idea what American gospel even was.

I'd never heard of it, never seen it. And I was just casually mentioning to a friend that I was working on this thing, I had to go to work the American gospel. Their job dropped.

So apparently in this area, it's really, it's really famous. They are apparently advertising. it in some of the churches. I had no idea how big this was. I had been contacted by several mom and pop, hey we want to do a documentary and I go look at their YouTube channel that might have five subscribers. So I was getting a line of these and then you contacted me and I had had so many of those. I honestly thought this was just some small operation. So after we're done and realized how big this was and what it was, I got the opportunity to go back and look into some of it

but that history fascinates me. So you talked about how you had the background and documentaries and how you created that. What drove you to continue that project instead of the set of the crime stuff that you're doing? I would say just my own church experience as I mentioned growing up in kind of a word faith context and even in the church I was in at the time I was making the first film. I realized it was very moralistic in the way they just they preached and secret sensitive to and what I mean by that is that the preaching was basically all focused

on what you need to do. Do more, love more, serve more. There was no hope of the gospel or you weren't being reminded that yeah you fall short of God's standard and here's what God did graciously for you in Jesus. So you're kind of left with just despair if you felt like you didn't measure up to what God required or pride thinking that you were self-righteously obeying all of God's law.

And so I realized like a healthy preaching has a good balance of both law and gospel. So the law should show you for non-Christians it shows people how they fall short and that they need a savior. For Christians it shows you how you should live in response to the grace that God has given you. So you know you're no longer trying to obey God to like earn his love or to earn salvation.

You've already been saved graciously by God not based on anything that you've done and now therefore obey because out of the love you have for God you should want to obey. And so I wasn't seeing that in my church and a lot of the people I went to call We're coming back with a very progressive understanding of Christianity where they were basically denying a lot of the essentials of the faith, but still calling themselves Christians, embracing teaching from people like Richard Roer, who's this Franciscan priest, who's a big influence on Rob Bell.

He's like a universalist who famously was denying the existence of hell through his book Love Winds. So all these different things kind of led me to wanting to create these films that tackled these different issues.

So the first one, the beginning talks about the moralistic preaching and then the word of faith movement. The second film, Christ Crucified, talks about progressive Christianity and in that film I actually interviewed people I disagreed with who were either atheists or progressive Christians that, as I mentioned, kind of deny different doctrines like the substitutionary atonement of Jesus that he died for our sins.

Like there are people who are Christians that deny that they would view the cross more as just Jesus being our moral example of how we should love our enemies. And there is truth to that, but that's not like I would say that the cross has multiple images of how you can interpret what God is doing in that.

But they reject the core which is Christ choosing and willingly choosing to take our punishment for our sins. So that's kind of the whole second film and this third film is focused on the new apostolic reformation and the Holy Spirit.

And this is different in that it's a docuseries, not a film. So it's multiple episodes, this first season of episodes, 13 episodes, an hour each. And the first season is mostly focused on Bethel Redding.

In future seasons I will dive into other movements, whether that's IHOP, you know I have people involved in the prophetic that realize that they were false prophets, false apostles. So there's all different angles that this movement, it's massive that you can approach this from and I initially started off thinking that you know this was just going to be like a two part.

film. I have this problem where my films end up being pretty long. Like the first one was two hours, 20 minutes, second one was almost three hours. So I thought I need more time. And the more I started researching the NAR, I realized like this needs to be a docu-series. Like there's no way I'm going to be able to explain what I need to explain and share. And there's so many different people that I met with different stories connected to this. And even going into the history, I think, is important. The Latter-Ain movement, Branum and John G. Lake and Dauy, and I just think that will

really help people understand, you know, seeing those parallels of what happened then and what's happening now. So yeah, I mean, John, your stuff will appear in the grave-soaking episodes this season, touching briefly on Branum and Dauy. But it won't be probably until a later season that I dive deeper into that. And you ran into some issues publishing, and initially, right? You interviewed people who weren't in the same opinion as you, and they apparently wanted to hold back.

Can you talk about that, Eddie? So Michael Brown, Dr. Michael Brown, is someone who is in the charismatic movement and has been known, in my observation, was known for being someone who would actually respond to criticism of the charismatic movement. During, I think, the 2013 strange fire conference that John McArthur hosted, he actually wrote a book in response to it called Authentic Fire. And Michael Brown's known for his connection to the Brownsville revival, which happened around the same time as the Toronto blessing. And in the 90s.

And he has a lot of connections to, like, Christ for the nation's institute, which I believe connect themselves to, is it Gordon Lindsay, who's connected to that? Yeah, if you watch a video on their website, they're connecting their history directly to Lindsay. And Brown is also known for denying that the NAR exists at all. So I felt like he'd be a great person to interview.

And when I interview people I disagree with, the agreement is to allow them to to review the content and approve it before they sign an appearance release. So I can't legally use their content in the project unless they sign and give me permission.

So with Dr. Brown, that was the most stressful thing I ever had to experience. Like I think he's just a big gas lighter and he was constantly telling me that I was in great sin for daring to critique these ministries that are involved with NAR, including Mike Bickel, who is now out of ministry under, you know, they just had the investigation that he abused multiple women over decades, even Gateway Church, Todd White, who is now, like all these people are falling like dominoes or being exposed for being abusers and frauds at this point, but Brown was telling me that I was slandering these good ministries and

that's kind of the reason why he decided to back out of the project. Now publicly he portrayed it as that he asked me to make changes but I refused to and that's why he backed out.

He also didn't want me to make any episodes about grave soaking because he thought it was a fringe of a fringe practice and I was blowing it out of proportion. But the truth of why he backed out was because he wanted me to change what other people were saying.

He didn't like mentioning Christ for the nation's institute because he was teaching there. And Gateway Church or Todd White and that wasn't part of our agreement for him to edit what other people were saying.

He could add his own, you know, arguments to counter what other people were saying but I wasn't going to like remove other people's stories based on his opinions. That just wasn't our agreement. So yeah, it was a big disruption.

He did allow us to post some roundtable discussions we did with him publicly which are on YouTube now but I'm not allowed to include them in my project. It's kind of a big financial hit but thankfully some people helped us make up for the loss.

Yeah, it's just after just trying to work with him, it just left us, it just took away my desire to want to work with anyone I disagree with just because of how that experience went unfortunately.

back to controlling the narrative, to alter or change or try to cover up the history. I ran into the same issue. Initially, I was having conversations with people who were in the random culture connected to it. I realized that they're doing pretty much the same thing, so I have partners and friends who engage the opposite opinion, but I seldom do. I usually just bring people who have escaped the cult and want to talk about their stories. This is a massive project and I recommend anybody who has interest or anybody who has been affected by it to check

them out. Where can they go to watch these videos? If you go to americangospel.com, that's our website, and we have three different pages for the three different movies, AG1, AG2, AG3. If you click on the AG3 page, you'll see a banner for Vimeo on demand. That's currently where it's available at this time. Four episodes of the 13 are available there. They can be purchased together for $15.96 or individually, I think the $3.99 for each one. That just helps us recoup our costs.

Filmmaking is kind of expensive when you're traveling and renting equipments and everything that goes with that. We'd appreciate your support if you can't afford it. One episode a month is available on our streaming service called AGTV, which is watchagtv.com.

The first episode only has four more days to be up before the second one will be there. So they've only been out about a month at this point, but I'm currently trying to finish up the rest of them and get those out sometime this year. If you had any advice to give people who have been affected by these movements, what advice would you give them? What what I do with these projects is just I'm my goal is to try to help people understand a biblical view of the gospel, which I would summarize as rest, rest in Christ. The gospel is all about God doing everything

for your salvation because he's gracious and merciful and there's nothing left for you to do to earn that salvation and love. I think what this movement does is just add to the gospel, they add burdens, requirements, you know, whether it's...

You got to do greater miracles than Jesus or, you know, they're promising physical healing now, along with your forgiveness of sins. You know, that's usually the way that works out is you have to do something to unlock that breakthrough.

It becomes this works-based system where now what should be grace, a free gift of God, you have to now work to get in your life to receive. And if you don't, there's something wrong with you. It's not God's fault. The burden is all on man.

And I really think that that system just leads people to a shipwrecked faith, leaving the faith. And so that's just kind of my goal is to point people to a biblical view of the gospel and to expose all these man-made errors and contrasts which are really focused all about the greatness of man.

And all about man's authority and power and it's what false teachers use to control people and to build their religious empires, unfortunately. And I hope the Lord uses it or continues to use these to help people see those truths.

I mean, He's done it in my life and I'm just trying to point to other people who've helped me and create these stories to kind of make a compelling case for the truth. Well, that's very good advice. Thank you so much for doing this.

You're welcome. Thank you for agreeing to help. Without looking into me, you know, John, you might want to do a little more research. I could have been a cult leader and you just didn't know.

If you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at americangospel.com and www.Williamdashbrandom.org. For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.

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